When attempting to close more deals, it’s common for business leaders to focus on making new connections and building brand awareness with prospective customers.
While this is an important step in accelerating sales, they often forget to leverage their existing business relationships and personal contacts. After all, a previously loyal customer moving jobs is a great trigger to engage in a sales conversation.
It’s also all too common for companies to fail in effectively keeping track of the aforementioned contacts, or to simply forget to nurture the relationship and keep in contact consistently.
Leveraging buyer job movements can drastically help to increase closing rates and boost revenue growth, so it’s well worth sustaining and strengthening network connections.
To help with this, our host Aurelien Mottier (Co-Founder and CEO, Operatix) sat down with Christian Kletzl (CEO at UserGems). They discuss best practices for leveraging both current relationships and buyer movements to win more deals, as well as interesting statistics that prove its importance.
The importance of contact
Often, business leaders make great connections, add them on LinkedIn and then fail to make regular contact. While building your online network is important, you aren’t utilising it if you aren’t interacting with them beyond liking the occasional post.
Nurturing your relationships not only means your company will continue to be see in a positive light, but that the contact will be more receptive to doing future business with you. Of course, this doesn’t mean needlessly bombaring every business contact you have with messages and phone calls, but rather touching base occasionally.
After all, its not technically the business that buys the product, but the person, which is why sustaining a positive relationship is so important. Be proactive in replying to posts, offering assistance when needed (such as when a business is facing difficulties) and providing value to the relationship.
“The B2B way of thinking is that organizations buy a product, but we should actually learn from B2B where it’s all about the the individuals. It’s not the organization that buys the product, it’s the individual. That’s the champion.”
Christian Kletzl, CEO at UserGems
Contact shouldn’t be made with the sole purpose of selling in the future, however. Keep it natural and valuable rather than overtly sales-y. React and comment on their posts – this has the added benefit of showing your profile to other people in their connections list.
Best practices for leveraging buyer job movements
If it seems as though people are changing jobs more rapidly, you may be correct – according to Christian, 20% of people do so every year. Many of these people will be those who have previously used your product – and may be interested in using it again, should the opportunity be right.
If you notice someone in your network has moved jobs, do some investigating. Is the company the right fit for your solution? What can you offer them? What pain points can you help solve?
“People are changing jobs more rapidly than ever before. When this happens, you should be noticing this, tracking them down, reaching out to them again and, once they settle into the new organization, if their could be a need for the product.”
Christian Kletzl, CEO at UserGems
If you notice someone in your network has moved jobs, do some investigating. Is the company the right fit for your solution? What can you offer them? What pain points can you help solve?
Once you’ve figured this out, you can start the conversation. Remember to be sensitive – after all, you do not know the circumstances around them leaving jobs, so don’t dive straight into the hard pitch. Engage in a natural conversation, congratulate them on their new role and then offer something of value.
Rather than commenting on their ‘new job’ post, direct message them on LinkedIn or give them a phone call. This allows for an opportunity to continue the conversation beyond a ‘congratulations’ and ‘thank you’.
Its worth keeping in mind that in the first 30 days of a role, the contact is unlikely to be making any big decisions and will simply be learning for the most part. Therefore, days 60 to 90 are more important, as this is when they’ll start thinking about what solutions they can bring to the business to make improvements – and their thoughts should come to yours, should they be relevant.
With this in mind, Christian typically sends a congratulations method to any previous client that has changed jobs, as well as thanking them for their custom and wishing them the best in their transition. Then, two to three weeks later, he approaches the contact again to see if there is any interest in exploring their services again.
This not only allows the client time to settle in and reach the point in which they can implement new solutions, but will ensure they don’t feel as though the initial contact was unnatural.
According to UserGem research, leveraging buyer job movements and acting upon them can ultimately result in 10 – 15% of your pipeline.
To hear this interview and many more like it, subscribe to B2B Revenue Acceleration on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, our website, YouTube or anywhere you get podcasts.
